February 2, 2010

Let's analyze Drudge's photos and headline juxtaposition for the Oscars:

I think he thinks it's funny to picture these 4 characters in a street fight. I'm saying 4, because I'm not counting the secondary figures in the bottom photographs, especially that female "Avatar" character, whom we don't enjoy picturing in a street fight, for reasons hilariously well-stated here:

Hey! Are you hacking my laptop or sumpin? Those are the last two things I viewed last night.

I kept skipping around until I worked back to RedLetterMedia because he bleeps out two words at the beginning and I know he doesn't demure from harsh language which made me think someone else was doing the bleeping which would reduce it. Turns out, I was wrong.

I'll take Drudge at his word when accused of being right-wing shill. Like yourself, he's posting what he finds interesting.

About the academy awards, I rather object to the results of that particular circle jerk becoming inevitable clues and solutions to eventual crossword puzzles. It forces me to acknowledge them. Because God, who sounded a bit like a Republican that day, told me best not to pay attention. And I go, "Wut?" And He goes, "You heard."

Avatar is the only movie I remember where people tell me with a straight face that it's the dumbest movie they've ever seen but that I need to see it [especially in 3D.]

I'll give it a pass. I'll give up special effects and even good production values for a good story. (I was recently "forced" to watch the second transformers movie by virtue of my kids watching it on DVD. Suck doesn't describe it. Same with Terminator Salvation. Complete lack of logic is even worse than lack of story [newsflash to Terminators and Marines on distant planets--poison gas and nuclear weapons.])

The unprecedented economic engine of your planet is being turned into another failed socialist experiment and you humans are worried that your planet will warm by a couple degrees because some self-identified frauds told you so? You are aware that your planet has been warmer than before and your species flourished, right?

I wonder how we explain to visiting alien, that some dude that wears a fedora with no journalistic credentials with a website drives the important stories of the day.

I think the likelihood that a visiting alien is going to be obsessed with Earthling credentialism is pretty low, all things considered. An alien would have no particular reason to be impressed by a Harvard or Oxbridge degree in general. Why would he be impressed by a Journalism degree from Columbia? Indeed, from the alien perspective, stripped of all merely human status assumptions, the New York Times is no different from any other random group of humans. There's no reason the NYT should drive stories any more than Drudge should. And that's to the extent that the concept of a specialised field of "journalism" is even intelligible to an alien race.

Seems to me, creating compelling costuming for a picture set in the 'real' world (current edition) takes much greater skill and care than creating big showy dresses for the latest boddice ripper.

On the one hand, I suppose it takes greater sensitivity to how clothing ensembles will read. But on the other hand, you can just buy most of the stuff off the rack somewhere, so it's not like there's the same sort of technical craft and skill as there is when you're designing stuff from scratch (scifi/fantasy), or you're trying to recreate some past historical era in fashion. That, and every person who pays attention to how he/she dresses does a bit of the real-world costuming every day.

Drudge does is link to news articles from all over the world and that's propaganda.

Well, truthfully, it can be. You can imply things through the juxtaposition of articles, and the selection of which details (or stories) you highlight as important, and which details (or stories) you reject as unimportant. This is how newspapers and news broadcasters operate as propagandists, after all. It's not all Goebbels/O'Reilly/Olbermann screaming hysterically into a microphone.

An alien rides in from the desert on the back of a donkey. After being weirded out for a while, the local sheriff says, "Well at least you're humanoid." The donkey tilts the alien puppet off his back and says "What do you mean, 'at least you're humanoid'?"

And that's not the end of the story. I wish I could remember who wrote it.

An alien capable of traveling interstellar distances would probably think it was quaint and funny that we CARED about global warming, endangered species, or any of the rest of the environmentalist canon. It would be like humans watching a dog bark at a vacuum cleaner.